


Rowechivi Coral

by gloss



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief, Love, M/M, Post-TRoS, Rey came back different, The Force Is Weird, and mysterious, hints of reylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 09:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23469064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: "I just want to know!" Poe says. "Indulge me, all right? Everyone's all spooky and Jedi-not-Jedi nowadays but I just want to know what thehellis going on."They're all trying to find their way after Exegol.
Relationships: Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn
Comments: 15
Kudos: 37
Collections: Robot Rainbow 2020





	Rowechivi Coral

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



On Kef Bir, Poe is crouched beside their broken ship, patching up coolant lines. The wind here is phenomenally strong. It beats in his ears, buffets his whole body. He has to grip the fuselage just to stay relatively upright as he works. 

A heat goes out of the world. One moment, he is concentrating hard, ignoring all the shitty comebacks to Finn that are only now occurring to him, hours later, in favor of untangling the shredded lines. The wind drops, and the sudden cold stillness knocks Poe over. Just as quickly, the wind resumes.

Something is missing. Something was inside of him but now it's gone, like an empty tooth socket. That constant, low-level thrumming headache he's had for years now has lifted.

They have the ship flight-ready when Finn and Jannah return.

"Rey?" Poe asks, but Finn just shakes his head as he pushes past. He's soaked from the sea and hunched. He looks like a stranger.

Jannah meets Poe's eyes. "She left. So did the big guy in black."

"Together?"

She shakes her head. At least that's something.

"Great," Poe replies. He's tired, and has been for longer than he can remember.

She scratches her arm. "What should I do next?"

He loves a person willing to get to work and ignore irresolvable abstract things. "We're doing spectacularly for your first day," he tells her, showing her the input valves that still need checking. "Don't think we're always this competent, all right?"

"Never fear," she says.

He grabs a spare jersey from the hold before heading back to the cockpit. The cold is beneath his skin, intervening, tightening.

*

Later, after everything, Exegol and so many funerals and nearly as many parties, Poe works out the sequence of events: argument with Finn on the hillside, fixing the ship, deaths of Leia and Kylo, cold. What he's never quite sure of, even years on, is which death he felt. Was it a fever breaking or a grief beginning?

He'd like it to be Leia's. He suspects that he's wrong.

*

Finn takes a break for food and hydration in the old gardens. Having trained for hours this morning, he is coated in sweat and slightly dizzy. Several swigs of petalwater and two cold protein dumplings, however, start to restore him. As he eats, he perches on the lip of a broad, low basin full of waterplants and enormous, slow-moving fish. This place used to be gloriously kept, he has been told, full of the most beautiful specimens of flora and fauna across seven systems. Now, the paths are narrowed, overgrown by vines and shrubbery, their flagstones cracked by moss and roots. The interconnected pools that once sparkled in the sun now resemble a loosely coiled, dark snake. Things move beneath the water's surface while leaves and petals drift across.

Finn catches sight of his reflection, nudged from below by the inscrutable motion of the fish, interrupted in between by a serrated leaf. His wrist comm sounds. It's a relief to drag his eyes away.

Poe's face hovers before the overhanging shrub, striped blue and silver. "How goes the great Jedi training quest?"

At the sight of Poe, Finn's already smiling. He can't help it. He tries to sound stern and fails. "It's not a Jedi training quest. How many times do I have to explain that?"

"Dunno, I'm pretty thick," Poe says.

"Only where it matters."

Poe's brow jumps up in happy surprise. "Good one! Also, thank you."

Finn drains the last of his petalwater sack before replying. "You're welcome."

"No, _you're_ welcome," Poe says huskily.

Amusement and desire spreading together through him, Finn smiles more widely. "That doesn't even make sense, you know that, right?"

"Eh, agree to disagree." Poe pauses then, hesitating about something. "Listen —"

"Is everything all right?"

"What? Of course! Everything's great! Couldn't be better, what with the state-building and refugee resettlement and _famine_ , have you heard about the famine on three moons?"

"Poe," Finn says. He rests his free hand on a hunk of coral emerging from the pool, then scrapes his palm back and forth over it. "What's up?"

"Can you teach me how to shield? I need to know. Preferably yesterday. Five years ago. Soon."

"What's shielding?"

"Oh, damn," Poe says. He turns aside, and his mouth twists miserably. Finn moves his hand too fast and slices open his thumb. "Well, shit."

*

A few weird things happen, here and there, but in the chaos of those early days, they are easy to ignore. Only as time passes and the examples accumulate does Poe start thinking them through.

After a briefing, Rey took him aside. She wanted to reassure him that the upcoming supply mission wouldn't be anything like his disastrous one to Tversko. Her concern as well as her confidence in him touched Poe. He didn't think anything of it until later, when he realized that particular mission predated her joining the Resistance by a good year and a half. Moreover, it had been secret enough that only Leia and Statura were aware of its existence.

Some days, she wore her hair in two braids, looped or coiled just behind her ears. He complimented her once on the thoughtful tribute and she'd just looked confused. "Tribute to what?"

He dreamed one night, then several more times, that she straddled him, her eyes burning red as she mocked the idea that the Resistance could not be intimidated. This one, he chalked up to stress and missing Finn. When Finn was home on base, they slept together, and Poe wasn't nearly so agitated.

He couldn't _tell_ Finn that, of course. However true it was, he would not put himself ahead of everything else — of Finn's own training and future, of Finn's closeness with Rey, of the whole damn post-war enterprise, whatever it was they were all trying to build here.

*

Finn arrives within ten hours. His hand is bandaged, his brows drawn tight. 

"You shouldn't have come," Poe tells him, many times, but Finn just hands him an overcoat and sets off down a path across the steppe. It's past moonset, so the violet-bruise shadows are long and deep. Somehow, Finn's figure is slightly limned in silver: the texture of his hair, the broad line of his shoulders.

"You _really_ shouldn't have," Poe says when he catches up. Finn has stopped on a rocky outcropping, one of those long, rough pieces of earth left here forever ago by a melting glacier or retreating, drying sea.

Rather than reply, Finn draws him down until they're sitting with legs tangled up, Finn's hands on Poe's face, Finn's eyes moving slowly back and forth. He might as well be looking into Poe's soul.

"And this would be why," Poe says hoarsely, "I need to learn shielding."

Finn doesn't smile. It wasn't Poe's best joke, to be sure, but Finn could at least acknowledge the effort.

Then he does something better: he kisses Poe, slowly and searchingly, until they're both tipping forward and breathless. 

"You think Rey's reading your mind?" Finn asks, winding their arms together, grasping Poe's hand.

"I don't know," Poe says. He has to be careful; Finn's friendship with Rey is primary and it always has been. "I do know — I know something's going on."

"She wouldn't do that."

Poe bites back the first, then the next few, responses to that that occur to him. Instead, he breathes out and in. "All right."

"I mean," Finn says, " _Rey_ wouldn't do that. But is she still Rey?"

*

Down in the lowland, the comms station winks against the darkness. Centuries ago, it used to be a sentinel on the inland sea. When the Rebel Alliance came to this planet, they rebuilt the old lighthouse into a watch and comms-relay station; then, thirty years later, the Resistance rehabilitated it once again.

Finn has thoughts about cyclical rescues and the persistent need for, recurrence of, rebellion. He doesn't share them just now, however. The tension in Poe's posture, the strain to his voice, is what's taking his attention. Out in the old pleasure gardens, Finn spent three tendays meditating and levitating, accessing the Force, _befriending_ it. 

They tried to talk, soon gave up, then fucked roughly and desperately against the rock. Now they're sitting, looking out over the grasses moving in the dark. Poe leans against Finn's chest. They share the warmth of the overcoat flung over them both.

"So that's it, then," Poe says. He clears his throat. "You're a Jedi."

Finn laughs a little, gently. "Wait, are you telling me this?"

"No, more like. Observing? Acknowledging what's right in front of us. Between us."

"I dunno, man, don't think much can get in between us right now." To underscore his point, Finn nudges his thigh against Poe's, then tightens his arm around Poe's shoulders.

"You know what I meant."

"Yeah," Finn says. "Yeah, I do."

Poe keeps looking out over the valley. His jaw works, but he doesn't say anything for a while. Their organic glowlamp has dimmed so far that most of Poe's face is in shadow, except for the reflections on his eyes.

Finally, Poe says, "you built a light saber."

"I did, yeah." 

"So you're a Jedi."

"Been doing some reading," Finn says, instead of replying to that. "A lot of reading, to tell the truth."

"Nerd."

"You know it." He presses his face into the sweaty curve of Poe's neck and inhales. "Jedi were kind of total dicks a lot of the time."

Poe gulps on a startled bark of laughter. It's easy to forget that he _can_ be shocked. Some things are actually heretical to him. Not many, but they exist.

"Celibacy, for one," Finn continues, "but that's just a part of the larger problem of separation. Disconnection."

"Uh-huh," Poe says carefully.

"The Force's in all of us." Finn pulls Poe closer yet, until he's lying across Finn's chest and Finn can link his hands together across Poe. "Comes in more clearly for some, sure, but —."

"Finn," Poe cuts in, "you're a Jedi. It's okay. It's your destiny. I'm — I'm not necessarily _all right_ with it, but I'm making my peace with it."

"There are infinite possible futures," Finn says. "Not destiny."

The funny thing (ironic, not hilarious, a distinction which he needs to make for Poe) about Finn's not-Jedi training is that he already excels at things like mindlessness, lack of attachment, sublimation.

What he needs are all the qualities Jedis were legendarily opposed to: passion, connection, individuality.

*

In the morning, he and Poe return to base. They amble through the grass, hands loosely linked, barely talking. The painful vertical divot between Poe's eyebrows has relaxed. Finn doesn't know what Poe is thinking, but nor is he worried. They have been able come to understandings swiftly since their first meeting.

Finn finds Rey in one of the machine shops. She and D-0 have a speeder motor partially disassembled before them. The little droid loops around it, chattering to himself: "good condition, not best. Good to fair! Fixable."

"I agree," she tells him, and her smile is gentle, so softly private that Finn almost takes a step back, his chest aching. She looks up then and the smile widens into something joyful. "Finn!"

"Back," he says, pointlessly, as she hugs him.

"I know," she says, "I felt it."

He's still getting used to _articulating_ these feelings. 

*

"Luke said once that no one's ever really gone," Rey tells them. They're sitting in her favorite place, the lounge of the _Falcon_. She and Finn are on the low banquette, facing each other with their legs drawn up. Poe's swinging back and forth in one of the single seats, dragging the toes of his boots against the floor.

"When?" Poe asks, sharply enough that Finn shoots him a look.

"It's all right," Rey says to Finn. To Poe, she adds, "on Crait."

He points at her in mocking triumph. "You weren't on Crait!"

"To Leia."

"Uh-huh." Poe has his arms crossed now, his body angled slightly away from Finn's line of sight. "She told you this?"

"Man —" Finn says to him.

"I just want to know!" Poe says. "Indulge me, all right? Everyone's all spooky and Jedi-not-Jedi nowadays but I just want to know what the _hell_ is going on."

Finn peers at him, his lips parted. Rey watches hundreds of expressions and feelings run over his face like rain, reflected on Poe's own face, and wonders, suddenly, what the hell she's doing here.

"Not exactly," she says to Poe. As she speaks, she nudges the Force against Finn, shifting him toward Poe. "She didn't tell me. I just...know."

Poe stares at her, incomprehension and irritation fighting through his posture and across his face.

"You're not alone, are you?" Finn asks quietly.

He always understood, even when she didn't want him to, when she needed to flee from herself. Rey's nodding now, faster and faster, her eyes burning and tears spilling. She doesn't have to speak to all but shout _yes_ ; she gulps for air and finds first Finn, then Poe, embracing her.

The Force passes through all of them, three bodies and five souls, a sudden and everlasting unit: _FinnReyBenLeiaPoe_.

"Not alone," one of them says and the rest believe it with everything they are.


End file.
